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The Web of Things

Overview
This whitepaper lays out a vision for how everyday things might be woven into the fabric of the Web. We start by
looking at the state of device networks today, and how IP and Web technologies can become enablers to tap the
huge potential of smart devices.

Networking of Things
implemented their own siloed solutions. The following diagram illustrates a small sampling of the vertically oriented

Automotive

Metering

Verticals

CAN-Bus

M-Bus

Proprietary

ControlNet

DeviceNet

Industrial
ProfieBus

Modbus

Lighting
DALI

Lonworks

BACnet

Konnex

Z-Wave

Zigbee

Residential

Commercial

solutions in use today:

X10

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Many vertical industries have been networking smart devices for decades. The problem is that each vertical has

This illustration just touches the surface of the device networking technologies in use today. Each industry tends to
have hundreds of protocols, most of them proprietary to the manufacturers. These networks tend to be run over low
cost media such as EIA-485 and are often installed, commissioned, and managed by non-IT professionals. So while
many things are networked today, very few of them are IP networked.

Internet of Things
Over the past two decades, there has been an explosion of standardization around IP.
Email and the web have been the killer apps, allowing IP to pretty much take over the world as the one and only
networking technology. The elegance of IP is that it defines a common interface between application protocols and
the heterogeneous networking technologies used to transmit those protocols. This model allows the Internet to be
enhanced gracefully. As new networking technologies become available such as Wifi, all our old protocols continue
to work. As new protocols are invented, they can be carried over existing networks:

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HTTP

SMTP

IMAP

XMPP

FTP

DNS

SIP

IP
Networks

Ethernet

WiFi

Cellular

15.4

RS-485/Serial

Contrast the Internet with the state of device networking today in which networks and protocols are stove-piped
silos with no interoperability. Historically it was considered too expensive to build IP devices. Even today there is
no standard for how to run IP over EIA-485 (the media most commonly used in device networks). But two wireless
technologies are quickly shifting the industry: cellular and 6LoWPAN.
Telemetry applications such as fleet management have been using cellular communications for many years. The
value-chain required to build cellular solutions is quite complicated, typically involving many vendors including
modem suppliers, carriers, and aggregators just to obtain basic connectivity. But as the industry matures, it is
becoming simpler and more cost effective to create cellular enabled devices. This has huge implications for the
Internet of Things - manufacturers can ship devices to the field with automatic, built-in connectivity. For example in a
residential application, no installer must be sent to help the home owner get a device onto their home network. The
cellular enabled device simply finds the network and reports itself when powered up. In commercial and industrial
markets, getting a device onto a network owned by the IT department can be a bureaucratic quagmire. Cellular
devices can bypass all this complexity and jump straight onto the Internet over the air.
Equally interesting is the advent of 6LoWPAN which provides an IETF standard for how to run IP over 802.15.4 which is
ideal for sensor networks. The ability to manufacture low cost, battery powered 6LoWPAN sensors has the potential
to add billions of lick and stick devices onto the Internet.
The only real problem today for using IP to network devices is lack of a standard for running IP over lost cost wired
media. Most of the hard work done by 6LowPAN for header compression would actually work quite well over
alternate media. Tridium is doing this today by running 6LoWPAN over mixed media: 15.4 and MSTP/485. But it is
critical that an IETF standard plugs this hole.
For the foreseeable future, many categories of smart devices will lack an Ethernet port. Wifi will continue to drop in
cost and will see its way into more devices. But the explosive growth in the Internet of Things will likely come from IP
over cellular, 6LoWPAN, and wired serial communications. There are many existing multi-billion industries which do
non-IP device networking today. Once a clear IP solution emerges which is better than what they use today, these
industries will likely migrate. But the most exciting opportunities will likely be from markets which dont exist yet. For
example Google could not exist 20 years ago because the Web didnt exist 20 years ago. The Internet of Things is
still in its infancy today a very small percentage of microprocessors are IP enabled.

The Web Drove the Internet

From the 70s until the mid 90s, the Internet was just another network. In fact, in the early 90s there wasnt any strong
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App Protocols

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indication that the Information Superhighway was going to be the Internet. Companies like CompuServe and AOL
ran huge walled-garden networks, and many non-TCP/IP protocols were in widespread use. In 1990 there were only
300,000 Internet hosts, but by 2000 there were over 72 million, and today almost 700 million:

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The explanation for the Internets hockey stick growth is undoubtedly the emergence of the World Wide Web in
the mid 90s. The Web was the killer application that acted as a catalyst to create a global standard for internetworking: the TCP/IP protocol suite.
But along the way over the last two decades, the Web has turned many technologies which sit above TCP/IP into de
facto standards also: HTTP, URIs, HTML, MIME encoded data, and JavaScript. IP is a critical enabling technology for
the Web, but the Web itself is best described by its application layer protocols and formats:
URI: are used to name and identify information
MIME: is used to encode information
HTTP: is used to retrieve transport information
HTML: is used to display information
These Web technologies are now the de facto global standard for sharing information.

Web of Things
The Internet was a key enabler for the Web, but it was the Web itself which really transformed information technology
and society as a whole. Likewise, the Internet of Things is just an enabler for what we really want: the Web of Things.
The Internet of Things gives everyday devices an IP address and lets them plug into the Internet. But the Web of
Things lets those devices integrate into the fabric of the Web itself and our lives.

It is the Web of Things which can truly unlock the potential of device networking. IP enables inter-networking,
but Web technologies enable information sharing. The goal for the Web of Things is to provide URIs to all the
information trapped inside smart devices, encode that information using standard MIME types, and transport that
information via HTTP.

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Applications and Services

Today smart device applications tend to follow the model of vertically oriented stove-piped silos. Increasingly the
opportunities to create new value lie in horizontal solutions which cross-cut verticals. For example, building out the
electricity distribution. Even today, many of these opportunities are not cost effective because it is too complex and
too expensive to implement connectivity to the devices. But the Web of Things can change this by making it as easy
to query information from a device as it is from a web-site.

Facility

Energy

Inventory

Equipment

Service

Mgmt

Mgmt

Mgmt

Mgmt

Bureau

Applications
URI/HTTP/MIME
Smart Devices

Residential

Commercial

Industrial

Health

Telematics

Just as IP became the focal point for gluing networking technology to application protocols, the Web of Things can
become the focal point for gluing devices across vertical domains to emerging applications and services. Making
device information available as normal Web services will have a transformative effect upon the entire value chain by
drastically simplifying how applications and services utilize networked devices.

Putting It All Together

Although the Web of Things is starting to take shape, there are still a couple of missing pieces. Existing networking
using Ethernet, Wifi, or cellular can already leverage Web technologies, although many verticals still cling to running
fieldbus protocols over IP. But the ability to utilize Web technology over 15.4 and serial media remains immature,
lacking many key standards. The key missing pieces:

IP over Serial
One of the biggest holes today is a standard for running IP over media such as twisted pair. The most obvious
solution would be to extend 6LoWPAN to utilize another MAC layer. No matter how successful 802.15.4 may be,
serial communications will never go away.

ROLL
Work is progressing within the IETF on the routing standards for setting up mesh 802.15.4 networks. However it
will likely still take a couple years before things are really mature. Most likely ROLL will also be required to deal
with how serial links are integrated into the PAN.

HTTP over 6LoWPAN

Although HTTP is the desired application protocol for the Web of Things, it will never successfully run directly
over 802.15.4 or serial links. The memory and packet size requirements for TCP and text headers are an ill fit for
the constraints of sensor networks and sleeping devices. This is really no different than why full IPv6 is unsuited
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smart grid requires device networking across many siloed markets: residential, commercial, industrial, metering, and

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for direct use over 15.4. But it doesnt mean we throw out what already exists, rather we figure out how to
optimize it for the problem space and still maintain HTTP semantics, URIs, and MIME encoded data for seamless
integration with the Web.

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We have proposed Chopan to solve this problem. Chopan defines a mechanism for compressing HTTP requests
and responses into small, binary UDP packets. The theory is for Chopan to compress HTTP, just like 6LoWPAN
compresses IP. The model is exactly the same, we just use a more efficient encoding.

See http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-frank-6lowpan-chopan-00 for a draft proposal.

Information Model
It seems unlikely that the Web of Things will standardize on a data format to the extent that the Human Web has
standardized on HTML. This is why it is so important to separate the transport (HTTP) from the data formats and their
encoding using MIME. Even though fragmentation is to be expected in information models, we believe oBIX is the
ideal solution.

oBIX
Virtually the entire history of standards in the device network industry have attempted to define models for every
potential type of known device. After almost two decades, this exercise continues to produce brittle models which
dont capture the reality of smart devices: devices are extremely heterogeneous with high variability between
manufacturers and product lines, and new devices continue to be introduced at a rapid rate. Compounding the
problem is that many devices are programmed from scratch in the field requiring individualized per device models.
oBIX embraces this reality by using a model based on a simple, flexible type system backed by real computer science.
oBIX focuses on a couple of key problems:
Defines a kernel model based on a few key primitive types such as integers, strings, etc. This isnt much
different than how a programming language like Java starts with a few primitive types.
Defines an open ended type system for both standards organizations and individual vendors or integrators to
build up their own custom models. This isnt much different from how a programming language like Java allows
people to build up their own class libraries.
Defines a simple, elegant mechanism to combine the models from different organizations into one system based
on prototype inheritance. This is the critical missing piece in most alternatives to oBIX.
Identifies all information using URIs with a design solidly based on REST, making it ideal for weaving the Web of
Things.

Encodings
oBIX provides a simple object model for exchanging basic data such as temperature values, as well as building up
arbitrary domain-specific type systems. Today oBIX models are encoded using XML, which is the format of choice
on the Web today. However, XML suffers from the same verbosity that makes HTTP ill suited for sensor networks.
To tackle this problem, the oBIX working group in OASIS is undertaking a new addition to the specification for
binary encoding. A binary oBIX encoding will enable encoding of payloads on the order of only a few bytes for
simple sensor data. And just as Chopan decompresses to full HTTP outside the sensor network, binary oBIX can be
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decompressed back into XML. This means that to the world at large the Web of Things is normal IP, HTTP, and XML
only on the sensor network do we use the compression of 6LoWPAN, Chopan, and binary-oBIX.

The diagram below illustrates what the full stack would include in the Web of Things:

Applications
URI/HTTP/MIME/XML-oBIX
URI/Chopan/MIME/Binary-oBIX
TCP/UDP/IP
Carriers
Ethernet

WiFi

Cellular

6LoPAN/ROLL
802.15.4

Serial

Smart Devices (Sedona script engine)

Security
Security concerns have the potential to stifle the growth of the Web of Things. One of the biggest problems
plaguing sensor networks is the lack of TCP. Most smart devices dont have the resources to run TCP, so while they
might be IP enabled, they are limited to UDP. But virtually all security techniques and protocols in wide use today
are based on TCP. Many techniques for encryption and preventing replay attacks are based on packet ordering. So
there is much work left to do.

Scripting
The ability to script web pages is perhaps the most important driver in the continual evolution of the Human Web.
Likewise, the ability to create scripts for devices will be a key enabler in the Web of Things. Most likely no de facto
standard will emerge for device scripting. While JavaScript dominates on the Human Web, it is always competing
against Flash, Java, and SilverLight.
Tridium offers Sedona as a solution for scripting the Web of Things. Sedona solves many of the unique challenges for
scripting devices:
Extremely small footprint: ability to run Sedona code along with a 6LoWPAN stack in under 100KB
Portable Runtime: very easy to port to new devices; doesnt require anything but an ANSI C compiler. It can run
on bare metal without an OS.
Portable Code: Sedona code is guaranteed portable to any Sedona device: write-once, run-anywhere.
Graphically Programmed: Sedona applications are designed to be assembled using a graphical programming
tool. This empowers everyday people to program the Web of Things.
Open Source: Tridium licenses the Sedona source code under a very liberal license, making it freely available to
any device manufacturer who wants to Sedona enable their device.
You can learn more about Sedona on the web at http://sedonadev.org/.

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Protocol Stack

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Conclusion
The Web of Things has the potential to transform the planet in the same way that the Human Web has done over the

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last fifteen years (and continues to do). Most of the enabling infrastructure for the Web of Things is snapping into
place, but there is still work left to do. Steps left to fulfill the vision:
1. Defining an IETF standard for 6LoWPAN over serial networks. We believe the MSTP specification from BACnet is
an ideal starting point.
2. Defining an IETF standard for running HTTP over constrained networks such as 6LoWPAN.
3. Potentially defining (or refining existing solutions) for security over UDP protocols.
4. Completing the oBIX 1.1 specification within OASIS.
Once the technology stack is complete, it is critical to start building momentum with many different players. The
Web of Things is in its infancy. Getting critical mass around a unified vision early has the potential to accelerate the
market and avoid fragmentation between vertical industries.

About Tridium
Tridium is the global leader in open platforms, application software frameworks, automation infrastructure
technology, energy management and device-to-enterprise integration solutions. Our technologies extend
connectivity, integration and interoperability to the millions of devices deployed in the market today and empowers
manufacturers to develop intelligent equipment systems and smart devices that enable collaboration and
communication between the enterprise and edge assets.

The Niagara Framework is a software platform that integrates diverse systems and devices regardless of
manufacturer, or communication protocol into a unified platform that can be easily managed and controlled in real
time over the Internet using a standard web browser.

The Sedona Framework is the industrys first, open source development framework that provides a complete
software platform for developing, deploying, integrating, and managing pervasive device applications at the lowest
level. It brings the power of programmable control and the Internet down to extremely inexpensive devices. The
Sedona Framework distributes decision making control and manageability to any device and brings intelligence and
connectivity to the network edge and back.

The company is an independent business entity of Honeywell International Inc.

Additional information about Tridium is available at www.tridium.com.

September, 2009